Monika Moore ’03

Monika Moore ’03 returned to her alma mater in March as the director of alumni and family engagement. She is an integral member of the senior team with the Office of Advancement, responsible for developing and implementing strategic oversight of Pomona College’s growing alumni and family engagement program.

Moore and her team will further strengthen Pomona’s expansive portfolio of activities and programs that engage the College’s global network of alumni, parents, families and volunteers. Working in close partnership with faculty, staff, and alumni and family leaders—including the Pomona College Alumni Association Board, Alumni Association Past Presidents Council and Family Leadership Council—Moore will lead efforts to re-envision events and programming, celebrate Pomona’s well-steeped traditions and create plentiful opportunities for engagement locally, regionally and globally. For more information, learn more at Monika Moore.

It wasn’t until after I retired in 2008 that I realized my entire career—first as a specialist on U.S.-Latin American relations, then as a theorist on global implications of the information revolution—sprang from two casual remarks by my great friend Henry Bastien ’63.

The first was in the summer of ’61, when he said, “Let’s go to Mexico for our junior year.”

If he’d not suggested studying at Mexico City College, I never would have become a Latin American specialist. I changed my major every semester my freshman and sophomore years. First it was English (gonna write a Great American Novel). Then psychology (gonna learn how minds work). Next art (gonna be an architect). And then, government (I forget why). Going to Mexico ended that uncertainty.

Soon as I returned for my senior year, I settled on international relations, with additional studies in Latin American history. I lucked out in having two terrific professors, Henry Cord Meyer and Michael Armacost, plus a fine visiting prof on Latin American history, Donald Bray. Then came Stanford University for an M.A. in Latin American studies, plus a Ph.D. in political science.

Next, on to RAND in 1972 as an analyst on U.S.-Latin American relations, mostly regarding Mexico, Cuba and Central America, plus aspects of international terrorism.

Henry reoriented my career a second time when I visited him at home in Mount Baldy Village around 1975. As I was leaving, he waved Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock and urged me to read it. It forecast a world-changing information revolution. I suddenly wanted to work on its global implications for political and security matters.

It took me 10 years to re-educate myself and make the transition, but I finally came up with results: a paper predicting the rise of a new form of government—I called it cyberocracy—that would redefine technocracy and democracy. Accordingly, the information revolution would favor network forms of organization, making them more attractive than hierarchies as a way to get stuff done. We would live in a world of networks versus nations.

Soon after the publication of the paper in 1991, a new colleague walked into my office and declared, “David, I have a single word for you: cyberwar.” Thus began a collaboration in which we formulated new concepts for rethinking the entire future conflict spectrum with terms like cyberwar, netwar and swarming (coordinated, networked strikes from multiple directions).

Plus, I got to meet Toffler, who wrote a foreword for one of our volumes.

Late in the 1990s, we worked on broader implications for statecraft. The information age will mean that “whose story wins” becomes almost as decisive as “whose weaponry wins.” The importance of “soft power”—e.g., narrative strategy, cognitive warfare—will grow relative to the traditional importance of “hard power.” But how to express that? Hard-power strategists had their classic realpolitik concept; soft-power strategists had nothing comparable.

So we turned to a century-old scientific vision whereby Earth first evolved a geological layer, the geosphere, then eons later a biosphere full of plant and animal life, including people. In this vision first proposed in the 1920s, a third layer would emerge next: the noosphere (from the Greek root “noos” meaning “mind”)—a globe-circling “thinking circuit” that would interconnect all cultures, religions, ideologies and mentalities, thus enabling higher levels of global cooperation, but also conflict.

We saw it was already taking shape, with immense implications for strategy. So we came up with a comprehensive new soft-power concept: noopolitik as an alternative to realpolitik—and later added noopolitics as a contrast to geopolitics. All this is playing out now in the fights over Ukraine and Gaza, where both noopolitical and geopolitical maneuvering are vigorously in play.

Meanwhile, while wondering what forms of organization besides networks were important, I unearthed a new framework about past, present and future social evolution. Accordingly, societies have relied across the ages on four cardinal forms of organization: tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets and information-age networks—in that order. This framework proved immediately useful, not only to forecast cyberwar and netwar as modes of conflict, but also to herald new modes of collaboration and coordination for those such as activists in non-government organizations working on human rights, environmental and other social problems.

I wanted to finish this framework at RAND but opted to retire in 2008 and continue at home. Here’s one implication I’m still trying to write up: For 200 years, our society has had three major realms: civil society, government, the economy. In the decades ahead, a fourth—a “commons sector”?—will slowly materialize around the network form. It will become the new home for those interconnected challenges that the existing three sectors no longer handle very well, such as health, education, welfare, the environment. They will all move, and be moved, into this next realm, vastly strengthening and improving our society.

My classmate Henry Bastien and I remain great friends, with keen memories of Pomona’s value to our lives. And in keeping with Pomona College Magazine’s most recent issue, I’m sure Pomona’s emphasis on liberal arts educated me to have sufficient flexibility and adaptability to refocus my career. But I better be careful around Henry now—I’m not sure I could handle a third shift at this point in life.

Melissa Barlow ’87

Melissa Barlow ’87 was selected to the officiating crew for the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four for the 12th time in her career this past season. She called the semifinal game between eventual national champion South Carolina and North Carolina State.

Barlow has officiated on the floor in 11 Final Four games and worked as the alternate at the scorer’s table one other time. She was the senior official of the 11-person Final Four crew for the most-watched women’s Final Four in history, with viewers drawn by Iowa star Caitlin Clark and South Carolina’s undefeated season.

Mindful of staying in sports officiating when she no longer wants to run up and down the court for the better part of an hour, Barlow has now trained as an NCAA football replay official who works from the booth. This football season, she’ll work in the role of communicator in the booth in the Big Ten Conference after wrapping up last season on the crew for the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium in New York.

Mike Budenholzer at a press conference. Courtesy of Phoenix Suns.

Mike Budenholzer ’92 grew emotional as he returned to his native Arizona in May and was introduced as the new coach of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns with family members and friends from his hometown of Holbrook on hand.

“My dad, Vince Budenholzer, 94 years old, sitting here in the front row. We call him the original Coach Bud, ’71 state championship with my brother Jim,” Budenholzer said at his first news conference. “I love you, Dad.”

Budenholzer, who won the 2021 NBA title as coach of the Milwaukee Bucks and twice has been chosen NBA Coach of the Year, grew up following the Suns.

“I don’t know what the word is, surreal or wild,” said Budenholzer, who reminisced about past players including Alvan Adams, Walter Davis and Paul Westphal and “my dad taking me in the backyard and teaching me Paul Westphal, reverse pivot into a pump fake into a step-through.”

At Pomona, Budenholzer was a four-year player and senior co-captain of the Sagehens basketball team and also played golf, while majoring in philosophy, politics and economics. Though he didn’t play for former coach Gregg Popovich at Pomona-Pitzer, he spent 19 years working for Popovich with the San Antonio Spurs, first as a video assistant and then for 17 seasons as an assistant coach, helping the Spurs to four NBA titles.

He’ll be trying to get the Suns, led by Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, to the NBA title he helped deny the Suns in the 2021 Finals.

“I can’t wait to get to work,” he said.